Thursday, February 11, 2016

educationright |
This also helps to make sense of what has struck me as most
incomprehensible about the reparations movement -- its complete
disregard for the simplest, most mundanely pragmatic question
about any political mobilization: How can we imagine building a
political force that would enable us to prevail on this issue? As
with earlier Pan-Africanist ideologues, internationalist rhetoric
is in part a sleight-of-hand attempt to sidestep that question by
abstracting to a larger black universe.

But the question ultimately does not arise because reparations
talk is rooted in a different kind of politics, a politics of
elite-brokerage and entreaty to the ruling class and its official
conscience, the philanthropic foundations, for racial side-
payments. Robinson makes this appeal unambiguously: "Until
America's white ruling class accepts the fact that the book never
closes on massive unredressed social wrongs, America can have no
future as one people." Lest there be any doubt about the limited
social vision that makes such an entreaty plausible, he brushes
away the deepest foundations of American inequality: "Lamentably,
there will always be poverty." His beef is that black Americans
are statistically overrepresented at the bottom. It is significant
as well that Jim Forman's 1969 demand was crafted at a conference
funded and organized by liberal religious foundations. This is a
protest politics that depends on the good will of those who hold
power. By definition, it is not equipped to challenge existing
relations of power and distribution other than marginally, with
token gestures.

There's a more insidious dynamic at work in this politics as well,
which helps to understand why the reparations idea suddenly has
spread so widely through mainstream political discourse. We are in
one of those rare moments in American history -- like the 1880s
and 1890s and the Great Depression -- when common circumstances of
economic and social insecurity have strengthened the potential for
building broad solidarity across race, gender and other identities
around shared concerns of daily life, concerns that only the
minority of comfortable and well-off can dismiss in favor of
monuments and apologies and a politics of psychobabble. Concerns
like access to quality health care, the right to a decent and
dignified livelihood, affordable housing, quality education for
all. These are objectives that can be pursued effectively only by
struggling to unite a wide section of the American population who
experience those concerns most acutely, the substantial majority
of this population who have lost those essential social benefits
or live in fear of losing them. And isn't it interesting that at
such a moment the corporate-dominated opinion-shaping media
discover and project a demand for racially defined reparations
that cuts precisely against building such solidarity? And isn't it
also interesting that Randall Robinson, mainstream poster boy for
reparations advocacy, is a member of the Rockefeller family's
Council on Foreign Relations?

I know that many activists who have taken up the cause of
reparations otherwise hold and enact a politics quite at odds with
the limitations that I've described here. To some extent, I
suspect their involvement stems from an old reflex of attempting
to locate a progressive kernel in the nationalist sensibility. It
certainly is an expression of a generally admirable commitment to
go where people seem to be moving. But we must ask: What people?
And where can this motion go? And we must be prepared to recognize
what can be only a political dead end -- or worse.